


Family

by AnorOmnis



Series: Their Unconquerable Souls [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 19:50:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21433771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnorOmnis/pseuds/AnorOmnis
Summary: After having gone undercover with werewolves to avoid having to deal with the blow-out of suspecting Sirius of being the spy, Remus returns gingerly to his old life, unsure of what he will find. Set in First Wizarding War. Moderate to heavy amounts of angst. Sort of a Remus character study. James and Lily are literal rays of sunshine because I say so. Two-chapter fic, probably.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Series: Their Unconquerable Souls [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1756231
Kudos: 10





	Family

The rubbish bin looked like it had been emptied not long ago, but Remus thought it would be remiss not to at least check it, as he had done for the past fifteen that he had scrounged through. After a few seconds of intense foraging accompanied by the dim glow of wandlight, he was forced to concede defeat. There was not, in fact, a single morsel of anything slightly edible left in the bin. Remus’ stomach groaned as he came to grips with the conclusion of his search. Mouth fixed in a grim line, he wearily dragged himself back to his apartment, resigned to the third day in a row without a proper meal.

Turning into the ramshackle alley which housed his flat, Remus mused that, at the very least, he’d not particularly had to worry about starving when he’d been with the werewolf pack.

_No, never had to worry about food, or rent, or shelter… _

It was almost enough to make him miss the traveling he’d done with them. An image of Greyback, his misshapen teeth yellowed and lips curled into a feral smile, leapt unbidden to his mind.

_Almost… but not quite._

His return to settled life in the past week may have come with its complications, but at the very least it kept the stuff of his nightmares very much confined to his sleep. Having to face the everyday demands of the Order – complete with financial insecurity, copious amounts of paperwork, and the perpetual fear of being summoned to ward off Death Eater attacks, was a walk in the park compared to the trembling he had to work desperately hard to suppress whenever he beheld his lupine sire.

Even so, Remus remembered wryly, his time with the pack had not been completely terrible. Greyback might well have been a nightmare cloaked in flesh, but he had not always been with the pack, disappearing as he had so often. As the Order’s resident werewolf spymaster, Remus had been able to reason that this probably had something to do with the leads they had received regarding Greyback’s involvement with the Death Eaters.

Those disappearances had given Remus the space to experience something entirely new and wonderful: the sensation of being around comrades like himself, who knew without asking or needing to be told the peculiarities of his world – the constant thrumming of the blood near the moon, the anguish of hearing, seeing, and feeling your bones crack and pull themselves into quadrupedal form, and the ratchety, painful sobbing which always shook his shattered little body the morning after. It had been the sensation of having a pack.

_A family_. _He hadn’t had a family in a while_.

He unlocked his front door with a rusty key and let himself into a dark, cold room. It was located in Muggle London, and he hadn’t been permitted to cast the typical Warming Charms that kept wizarding residences cozy for fear of discovery, or the neighbours asking questions. The Ministry had thought it to be too much of a security risk, particularly in these testing times. Remus snorted at the memory. _A security risk_. There was nothing which could discern a Warming Charm from a typical Muggle thermostat.

He knew the reason that he had been rejected his request. It was the same reason that a surly faced Ministry official had once told him that his application to work in the International Magical Cooperation office had unfortunately been denied, why he had once awoken to find a letter informing him that he would have to submit himself to interrogation following a series of Dark activities in a nearby hamlet, and why he had to report to a lonely cell in the middle of the wilderness once a month. They all traced back to a paper titled Remus Lupin filed under the heading ‘Known Beasts of Classification: XXXXX’ gathering dust in a box in the corner of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.

_No, _Remus thought, _he hadn’t had a family in some time now._

He’d thought that he did, for a while. Somewhere along his school years, all the way up into that first scary but inspiring year fighting for the Order, Remus had managed to convince himself that he was not alone. He’d had a family then – James, Sirius, Peter, Lily. They had loved him, and he, them – and that was all that family was, after all, wasn’t it? (It was, but his assumption had from the first been flawed.)

That was very much over now, and it had been for as long as Remus had suspected his long-time best friend, Sirius Black, of being the mole within the Order. He had tried to ignore the evidence. At first, it had been easy enough. After all, what did it matter that so many of the Blacks and their friends had pledged allegiance to Voldemort? Sirius had made it abundantly clear to everyone who knew him that he was not like his family and that he loathed them with blinding, sizzling intensity. Remus almost laughed at how easily he had been beguiled. When news of Regulus’ death had reached them and Sirius had wept, Remus had been able to dismiss it easily enough as the regretful tears of an older brother shed for a life that could have been, rather than those of a comrade-in-arms. Sirius, after all, had loudly proclaimed his hatred of the Dark Arts from childhood.

But the evidence had continued to pile up, in that uncomfortable way that assignments and essays did just before the OWLS, and Remus had not been able to keep doubt from his heart. Sirius had been given an official reprimand by the Order when it was found that he had attempted to use the Cruciatus curse against a Death Eater in combat. James had stood by him them, loudly proclaiming to everyone that it was a mistake, just something that had happened in the heat of battle. He’d bristled so angrily that everyone’s senses of self-preservation seemed to have kicked in, and it was a reprimand rather than expulsion from the Order which had been deemed appropriate punishment. Remus had tried to shove the uncomfortable reality of his friend attempting an Unforgiveable Curse to the back of his mind, and had almost succeeded in doing so, but for a chance conversation that he had with Peter.

‘The Ministry’s considering legalizing the use of the Unforgiveable Curses for Aurors, have you heard?’ Remus had asked, righteously incensed.

Wormtail, ever the devil’s advocate, had screwed up his nose in thought before responding, ‘Well, I can’t say I’m completely opposed.’ Remus’ immediately shocked look jolted him into continuing, carefully choosing his words so as not to upset him further, ‘All I’m saying is, there are already plenty of situations where it’s kill or be killed. We’re already trying to kill them, right? I’m as unhappy about it as you are, but I can’t see that it’s completely wrong to use the one spell designed to do that.’

Remus had tried to appeal to Peter’s morality, to the _ethics_ of the thing, the terrible truth of torture, and control, and murder, and of the immense cost that the Dark Arts exacted upon the soul of the user.

‘-Whoah, whoah, whoah. I didn’t say anything about _torture_, Moony! Maybe there’s some use to the Killing Curse and the Imperius Curse, maybe not. But I’m definitely a hundred percent with you when it comes to the Cruciatus. It’s terrible! I don’t think there’s any use to it whatsoever – you’d only use it if you were completely twiste-,’ Peter had stopped, suddenly aghast with the implication of his words.

But it had been too late. Remus’ naturally logical mind had neatly pulled out the memory of Sirius’ hearing from his ‘Do Not Under Any Circumstances Ever Think About’ shelf and combined it with this new conversation in a most disastrous alchemy. Peter was absolutely right. Anyone who used the Cruciatus would have to be absolutely twisted. (_Just as all werewolves were twisted_, a treacherous part of his brain had smugly suggested. He hadn’t listened.)

His _problem_ with Sirius had begun to emerge then, but it had not yet found the right soil in which to grow into something larger. That had come a few months ago, when Mad-Eye had returned, bloodied and missing a leg, from a raid on a suspected Death Eater haunt, holding in his hands an ear – the last proof that his partner, Benjy Fenwick, had ever walked this earth.

‘Someone has been leaking information about the Order’s operations. Though it grieves me to say this, we have reason to believe that there is a spy among our ranks.’ Dumbledore had announced, calmly, but with the resonance of an immeasurable sorrow, at their emergency meeting.

‘One of you fuckers is a thrice-damned mole,’ Moody had said, less calmly, as everyone left the room at the end of the meeting. ‘CONSTANT VIGILANCE!’

And Remus had been vigilant, though he wished he hadn’t been. He had put the pieces together again. There had been five people who had known about the mission: Dumbledore, Moody, Fenwick, Remus, and Sirius. Dumbledore being the leak was laughable; he had been the one to establish the order in the first place. Nor did it make sense for Moody or Fenwick to arrange for their own suicide. And Remus hadn’t told anyone else.

Which had left only Sirius. The same Sirius who had recently attempted to torture another human being. The same Sirius who had wept thick, salty tears for a Death Eater. The same Sirius whose entire lineage seemed to have some putrid corruption infesting the blood that flowed through their veins, turning them impossibly Dark, and making mockery of their humanity. The same Sirius that (Remus hated himself for thinking it) had nearly been responsible for turning Remus into an unwitting murderer back in his schooling years.

Remus had run out of excuses for his schoolfriend. His own feelings were not half as important as the fight that the Order waged against Voldemort, and they had to be ruthlessly culled. He had to kill the Sirius he had grown to believe he knew in his head. There were still others to protect – James, Lily, Peter. The day after learning there was a leak, he had feverishly muttered their names to himself for hours upon hours – a pentasyllabic mantra to appeal to some higher being to keep what mattered safe, to keep his once-family safe.

Because, after all, Remus knew they couldn’t be his family now. The moment he had come to suspect Sirius, he had told them, and he had told Dumbledore. Sirius had, in turn, revealed his own suspicions of Remus. It was to be expected from the spy, after all. His friends had been caught in the heart of the most consequential game of tug-of-war in the world.

Except it was never going to be a balanced game, and Remus knew it. James, Lily, Peter. They would never choose him over Sirius. Sirius was everything he could not be – bright, funny, brilliant, and perpetually reliable. Remus was a broke werewolf with one clean pair of underpants. Even if there had been the potential to make a choice, Remus didn’t know if he could ever have demanded it of James.

He knew how much Sirius had meant to James – had known since James had first sent him the letter telling him that Sirius would be living with him now that he’d run away from home. _Family._ Remus laughed mirthlessly. His relationship with James had never been comparable to the one that James had shared with Sirius. Brothers, that was how they saw themselves, and that was how the world saw them. Remus had never been much more than an afterthought.

And so, caught in between a moral dilemma and the prospect of never having friends again, Remus had done what all weak cowards did – he’d run away. Dumbledore had previously mentioned to him the need for a spy in the ranks of the werewolves, and Remus had gladly jumped on the opportunity and fled. It had kept him from having to face reality for nearly eleven months, completely devoid of contact from anyone except Dumbledore.

He had only learned about Lily’s pregnancy three months in because his former headmaster had chosen to send him an extra missive informing him of it, and cheerily congratulating him on the upcoming addition to his family. _Family_. A less cheery missive had followed a few months later, informing him of a prophecy, and of Lily and James having gone into hiding, soon to be placed under the Fidelius Charm, for fear of being hunted down by Voldemort himself.

Remus had read the letter and felt chilled to the bone. In his travels with the wolfpack, he had seen what Voldemort was capable of. Towns razed to the ground, dry holes in the sound where there had once been rivers, and hordes of the undead running jerkily across hundreds of miles to wet their lips with the blood of the living. He had immediately lambasted himself for his self-pity about his irrelevant personal problems, and had resolved to do whatever he could to help James, Lily, and their unborn child as soon as he had returned. Even if they could never love him again, he owed it to them. (He never let himself acknowledge that treacherous little part of his mind that thought he might be able to bribe his way back into their lives if he could help them.)

So far, he had failed spectacularly. In the week that he had been back, Remus had pored endlessly over every book he could find on anything at all relevant to the vague matters at hand – Divination, prophecies, the Fidelius Charm, wards, seals – anything that might afford him the upper hand. He had found nothing. But he wouldn’t stop. He would keep on going – for James and Lily. For the people who had made everything worth it.

He pulled out another book from his groaning shelf, well stocked by courtesy of Dumbledore learning about and encouraging his research in hopes of finding answers that he himself had not yet found. _The Panopticon of Prophecy: A Treatise on the Discovery, Deciphering, and Compilation of Portentuous Sayings in The Far East Between the Years 1253 and 1740 by Enjolras Grantaire_ proved to be about as lucid of a read as the title suggested and within fifteen pages Remus could feel a headache coming on.

_He couldn’t find anything!_ He angrily massaged his temple, before flipping the book open again. A few minutes passed, during which Remus was unable to make any further sense of the tome. _NOTHING!_ Something snapped in his head. He roared in wrathful despair, and flung his book out of his room. Three sounds followed his action in quick succession. First – the telltale crack of Apparition. Second - the thud of the book connecting with something which didn’t sound like a floor or a wall. Third –

‘Moon- Buggerin’ OUCH!’

Remus winced as James Potter limped into his room, looking extremely confused.

‘This is definitely a first as far as Anti-Apparition wards go.’


End file.
